I mean, you don’t have to buy the new one. I guess as long as they’re not forcing you to upgrade while your current phone is still fine, it shouldn’t have too much impact on e-waste and stuff for them to refresh the parts list and specs for new buyers.
Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, at current use.
More like somewhere between 200 years and a couple million years, assuming we fire back up and finish developing some 60-year old technologies.
Fission as a serious replacement for just coal plants is a pipe dream without asteroid mining.
pipe dream without asteroid mining
…Yeah, no. At least, not yet. Plus, the energetic and engineering challenges to just throw “asteroid mining” into the conversation are insane— So you’re burning either fossil or synthetic/biofuels for the launch, electric ion (which is itself insanely difficult and expensive) I presume (so, I.e. nuclear or solar) for in-orbit maneuvering, for rocks that aren’t even that that big and which you don’t even have the technology to do anything with.
We have most minerals in sufficient quantities in the Earth’s crust. And more importantly, we have the industrial processes to extract them efficiently. Fission is viable, has been for a long time, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
contrary to what people pretend we still don’t have a good answer for the waste.
It’s rocks. Processed “nuclear waste” is literally just rocks. (Well, technically it’s solid glass covered in welded steel.) It’s not like air pollution that we end up breathing in, and it’s not like the chemical waste from other industries (including from batteries and rare earth extraction) which finds its way to the water cycle where it then bioaccumulates. If you’re picturing a glowing green river, or a barrel full of leaking sludge— Well, that’s not it.
It can’t hurt you unless you powder it and huff it or build furniture with it or do something insanely stupid like that. And there are other much easier and more dangerous ways for malicious actors to hurt you too, that don’t involve breaking into secure facilities to steal the some of the heaviest elements known to exist.
Dig a big hole and toss the waste a kilometer or two down the Canadian Shield, and it will sit there inert for a billion years long after it’s burnt through all its dangerous levels of residual radioactivity.
We need a global fusion research project
We already have a couple of those. If everything goes perfectly for them, they might become commercially widespread right around the same time the hard-to-reverse effects of climate change might become truly apocalyptic in the second half of this century. If the past history of this field of research is any indication, they quite possibly won’t really work, will work but only a decade or two behind schedule and several times over budget, or will lead nowhere except for some media coverage that’s good for military-industrial stock prices or whatever.
This isn’t Sid Meier’s Civilization, where you can click “Global Fusion Research Project” and get a +100% boost to production after 20 turns. To quote Randall Munroe, “Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell’s equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations”. Fusion is hard, or else we’d already be doing it, and though we know it’s definitely possible, there’s no guarantee of anything when it comes to actually engineering it.
orbital solar.
Uhh… No. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to blast photovoltaics into an incredibly hostile environment, where they can’t even be cooled by dissipating into the atmosphere, is not probably going to bring energy costs down, at current or near-future technology levels.
Plus any system capable of precisely beaming terawatts of power from space into localized collectors on the planetary surface is (1) probably by definition an omnipresent death ray and (2) probably at least going to fuck up a lot of migrating birds and components of the atmosphere.
Simple as that.
…
but the issue with uranium is that it’s basically in dictatorships
…No. It seems like a bad time to be a plant. Too many wildfires, weird things are kinda happening to atmospheric composition, plus invasive species everywhere— Ugh, pine beetles crawling all up in my skin, hogweed taking my nutrients? No thank you. Maybe later— Definitely want the autotrophy eventually, but taking like a 95% hit to metabolic rate and being unable to go indoors obviously wouldn’t be acceptable either…
Seriously though, the comment you replied to also mentioned a few products by name, so I thought I’d reflect that hey, Bluetooth hasn’t been quite as bad as I’d expected it would be, even if most headsets are either overpriced or garbage.
Other than the 3.5mm still being universal basically everywhere except for phones, it’s also universal in a purist physical sense.
Any old piece of scrap copper wire connected to a 3.5mm jack, wrapped vaguely into a coil, and placed next to something magnetic, should form a working speaker compatible with the 3.5mm jack. It won’t sound hi-fi, but it will work, because unlike Bluetooth or USB-C where you have to read hundreds of pages of standards and do a bunch of engineering just to figure out how to understand the signal, the signal in the 3.5mm jack basically is the sound.
This has direct practical implications as well: The transparent simplicity vs opaque complexity is why wired headphones can be so cheap and yet so reliable, or as hi-fi as your DAC and the speaker cone will allow, whereas Bluetooth devices are comparatively expensive, a mess to connect, fragile, bandwidth-limited, and environmentally and ethically dubious.
Bluetooth, and even USB-C, is basically black magic— Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s also glitchy black magic. And this remains true regardless of device availability, because it’s determined by the physics of the technology itself is implemented.
I’ve been using the same (comparatively) cheap Sony WIC100 in-ear Bluetooth headset every day for several (over four?) years now. It’s lasted longer than basically any of the cheap wired earbuds I kept replacing before ever did, and still has all-day battery life too. I haven’t been particularly careful with it; Generally, I’ve just crumpled it up and stuffed it in my pocket with my keys, and probably semi-regularly snagged and yanked it on stuff pretty hard. Losing it is not really a concern; It’s all one flexible piece, and it’s basically the same profile or even slightly bulkier and heavier than wired earbuds when coiled up (but still more convenient when worn, because it doesn’t run the length of the torso). Plus they can just dangle safely from my neck when I need to hear stuff around me, which neither wired headphones nor “true wireless” headphones can do.
I agree with all your points in principle, and I still pay attention to the headphone jack when evaluating phones. But the corporations that make our consumer electronics have decided this is the trend they’re going with. Ultimately, you can either adapt, stop using the technology, or make your own with Raspi and SLA or whatever.
Let us not forget that S7 and S7 Edge had headphone jack and were waterproof.
Not user-disassemblable, much less Lego-style modular, though. Easy to make something “waterproof” when you can just seal it shut with “gooey black adhesive”.
I personally think the headphone jack is a wonderful truly universal and effectively completely open standard that’s very good at what it does, and which furthermore is doubly useful as a generic power and analog signal delivery mechanism, while mandating its supposed successors like Bluetooth and USB-C needlessly and massively inflates the technical and material cost of just playing a dang sound file. You could get serviceable wired headphones that last forever for like $5 if you were lucky; Nowadays, you pay at least ten times that for fragile lithium batteries and circuitry that will break in a couple years, and I really don’t like this trend of taking away capabilities for less robust alternatives while portraying it as innovating.
But I also actually use my Bluetooth headphones way more than my wired ones, and I appreciate the potential engineering and market challenges in what Fairphone is trying to do here.
Don’t say that, @FlyingSquid. You’re beautiful, and when us primates are doing ruining ourselves, you will inherit the earth and fly over mountains and forests as well.
Who is this “God” Person Anyway?
…That’s a salt, though, right?
If you’re counting non-NaCl salts as answers, then basically any “mineral” our body needs would probably be delivered at least partly in salt form. Just reading off some multivitamins here:
(I haven’t fully checked all of these are salts— But I mean, a lot of of them are blatantly chemical analogues of stuff that definitely is salt (E.G. “Potassium Iodide” vs. “Sodium Chloride”), plus they’re metals bonded to ionic groups so they’re definitely not alloys or covalent molecules or ceramics.)
This is probably because in order for our body to absorb stuff, it basically has be water-soluble, which means salts work quite well.
When eating real food (plants, animals, and fungi), I assume a lot of this won’t be in salt form, but rather it will mostly be bound up in proteins and DNA and such. For example, iron should be primarily in hemoglobin instead of ferrous fumarate. But some of it, for example the potassium, will definitely be technically in the form of dissolved salts/minerals in the fluids inside the food.
You can of course also rearrange the compounds around. For example, this can of Windsor-brand “salt free salt substitute” I have here further lists:
You’ll note that these are some of the same components as in the list above, just a different combination. I’m pretty sure any ionic mineral that includes at least one ion that our body needs technically counts as “food”, as long as the other half isn’t poisonous— They should be basically the same when they dissolve in the water in our stomachs anyway.
Meats can also be preserved by adding nitrates and nitrites to it, though technically I guess that’s more of a likely-carcinogenic additive than part of the “food”.
Fun fact: Your body sorta knows when it’s low on minerals, and will want to start eating dirt and rocks in order to make up for it! Over 100 different types of primate do it too. So in that case, you could probably argue that plain rocks and soil literally are food, in that they provide vital nutrients the body needs and that your brain is smart enough to know that. …These days it’s apparently considered a mental disorder, but I swear it made much more sense back when the likeliest thing you were going to eat was some mud, rather than lead-contaminated radioactive refrigerants or whatever it is we’ve surrounded ourselves with.
I am not a doctor. Don’t go around eating rocks unless you’re a bird or some other type of dinosaur.
Oh. Funny. I was actually wondering when I posted this if anyone would take me seriously— Though I was imagining my abusers pretending to take it seriously in bad faith in order to hurt my credibility, and then how I would then have to explain myself to well-meaning people who might just be less familiar with the Linux-side systems I mentioned.
I was joking. Saying cmd.exe uses WSL→X11→xdotool→GUI to operate is a bit like saying “Every Toyota is secretly powered by a tiny little Honda with a tiny little man driving on a treadmill that’s connected to the wheels under the hood”. (xdotool is basically just a keyboard and mouse macro thing— So maybe you can imagine how silly it would be if you typed in cd or ls/dir or whatever and it just took over control of your mouse and clicked on the “File Explorer” from the “Start Menu”.) It would be such an absurd and Frankensteinian design that I find the thought of it intrinsically funny.
Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Fun fact: Every Windows command line command actually just spams xdotool through the X11 server on WSL in order to do the equivalent action through the Windows GUI.
Definitely fly both at once, or overlay them tastefully or something, instead of going full pride-version.
Mutilating the country’s flag in order to show your “patriotism”, as certain groups do, is… Certainly an interesting symbolic choice.
Wearing or sporting an American flag gets all the wrong kind of attention. I really don’t want to deal with it. Frightening minorities and getting thumbs up/nods from racists isn’t really my thing.
Then stick it next to a rainbow flag, or a Statue of Liberty, or a peace sign, or the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, or any of the symbols that y’all actually do still have for actual freedom.
It’s all about the messaging. Make it clear: “This is the flag of the nation, for everybody in the nation, and anyone who flies a mutilated version of it is a coward.”
There’s a slim chance someone with a regular American flag isn’t a nationalist twat.
Y’all should really reclaim that. It’s a good flag, and it’s supposed to mean some things that are actually quite nice.
Idk. It’s probably morally grey at best, but the military is at least honest that they kill people. Air pollution apparently kills 6.7 million people annually, compared to every war put together killing just 0.1 million people annually over the last decade. But the difference is that if you work in air pollution you get to run slick ads bragging about how clean you are, whereas if work in murder-machines you’re more directly confronted with the reality and the gravity of what you’re doing— The latter may be scarier, but the former feels much more gross.
Ideally you duct-tape a grenade to each of your “decoys” so it doesn’t really matter either way which target they choose to prioritize